Old MacPSINet had a farm

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UK ISP PSINet has opened one of Europe's biggest server farms in London. The £30 million hosting centre on the Isle of Dogs* has nine floors and houses 4,000 racks, with 20 servers per rack. The Centre has NT and UNIX servers from HP, and three levels of server – plus all servers have mirrored or RAID-5 grade discs. Offsite backups are available for customers. Its location means it is only a mile from Telehouse – the European connection site and home of LINX. The facility will have over 100 sales and technical staff. There are three back-up generators, uninterruptable power supplies (UPS) and three separate power feeds from the National Grid. The data centre, which opened on Tuesday, will make it cheaper for companies to get their servers hosted here in the UK. The US currently controls around 70 per cent of the world Web server farms, as well as having cheaper bandwidth. PSINet will keep its existing smaller hosting centre in London’s Docklands, rented from Telewest, and its headquarters in Cambridge, the company said. The move follows Intel's announcement to move into this server hosting area. Last month Craig Barrett, Intel CEO, breezed into London and announced plans for 10 such facilities worldwide, including one in London. In March the chip maker bought $200 million worth of US broadband network provider Williams Communications. ® *Register Mega Fact No: 704 The Isle of Dogs is thought to get its name from Henry VIII, who used to keep hunting dogs on this island in the Thames.